Whether awakening today within the shadow of Table Mountain, whether enjoying the arresting view of a late winter snowfall or whether transfixed by the image of a tall ship on the sea, the inspiring impression beneath the surface is the coming of spring. It is Nature’s own arousal. Naturally it is a northern hemisphere progression, a cycle punctuated by an email from the South Pacific in which my dear friend Pierre in New Zealand wryly noted, “Beautiful sunny autumn day today, 21°C”. Nonetheless in true Bertie Wooster fashion, the brilliantly sunny day evokes a naughty but innocent Boomps-a-Daisy character. We can never totally control our vantage of the perspective; but we can always control our perspective of the vantage.

I am persuaded to poetic eloquence regarding the soft overnight snowfall which has painted upon the distant fields a muted white blanket with fragments of cornstalk stubble amid parallel lines of tawny yellow boundaries. But it is sufficient that I capture the zeal of the moment. How we assess ourselves and our day is material to the consequence. Just as we end as we began – that is, naked and detached – it behooves us to estrange ourselves from the immediacy of our lives so that we are better prepared to contemplate what is to come. The present is forever at hand.  Its mysterious ingredients tint our lives. There shall always remain yearnings to travel, the urgency to discover whence we have come by whither we go. But the crescendos of life are the vividness of the sky, the magic of the weather cleansed by the gusts of wind and warmed by the ascending temperatures.

Definition and clarity are mutually conducive. Within one’s sight is all there is. Intimacy drives the product. No matter the wallpaper, the furnishings or the architecture, it is the generosity of one’s own contribution to the outlook which promotes the advantage.